Trump says Iran is ‘based on disinformation.’ Experts say its influence operations go far beyond that.
Experts say Trump’s framing understates a broader system of propaganda, covert influence and censorship
Amid false information spread during the Iran war, the Trump administration warned that the Iranian regime was misinforming people with the help of generative artificial intelligence.
“They are a country that for years — I didn’t know this until recently — they’re a country based on disinformation. And now they’re using disinformation plus AI. And that’s a terrible situation,” President Donald Trump said during a March 16 event.
On separate occasions, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke of fake footage showing the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on fire.
“These AI-generated images are meant to make it look like something’s happening when the exact opposite is,” Hegseth said in a March 19 press briefing. “So they make up fake reports and fake images to lie to their own people.”
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors
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On top of a failing business model, newsrooms must navigate the powerful — and not fully reliable — new capabilities of artificial intelligence and the deployment of large language models.
State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.